In 1907 he became professor of comparative history of classical and neo-Latin languages the Faculty of Letters at the University of Turin, where he served until his death.[1]

His study on the Dalmatian language, Das Dalmatische (2 vol. 1906) is the only known complete description of the language, which is now extinct. It remains "the standard work on Dalmatian," and contains every known text in the language.[3] Bartoli used data gathered in 1897 from the last speaker of Dalmatian, Tuone Udaina, who was killed in an explosives accident on June 10, 1898.

He also wrote Introduzione alla neolinguistica ("Introduction to neolinguistics", 1925) and Saggi di linguistica spaziale ("Essays in spatial linguistics", 1945) and was the teacher of Antonio Gramsci.[2]